About The Books

Worldly Wisdom leads readers through some fifty classic works of literature, philosophy, and political thought from Homer and Confucius to Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel García Márquez to draw out ideas valuable for understanding human life in this world and for living that life well. Engagingly written for anyone who thinks about such ideas, as well as for anyone curious to know what great authors have thought about them, Worldly Wisdom offers both an inviting liberal education and a usefully humanistic self-help book.

I. HUMAN NATURE, ETHICS, AND THE GOOD LIFE
1. The Tragic Sense of Life and the Dawn of Humanism 3
Homer: The Iliad
2. Control Yourself 23
Hinduism: Bhagavad-Gita
Buddhism: Dhammapada 3. What Do You Know? How Do You Know It? Why Should You Care? 41
Plato: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo 4. Living the Good Life 61
Aristotle: Ethics 5. The Moral Landscape of Hell 78
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy: The Inferno 6. Growing Up Naturally 100
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile 7. Enough? Never! 121
Johann von Goethe: Faust 8. From the Maggot Man to the Superman 136
Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals 9. Condemned to Be Free
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Grand Inquisitor”
Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism

II. LIVING IN THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL WORLD
10. Find the Right Way, Do the Right Thing 173
Confucianism: The Analects; The Great Learning;The Doctrine of the Mean
Taoism: Tao te Ching; Chuang Tzu11. How to Succeed in the Business of Life 191
Niccoló Machiavelli: The Prince12. So It Seems 205
William Shakespeare: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear
Moliére: The Misanthrope13. The Price of Mis-Education 226
Voltaire: Candide
Charles Dickens: Hard Times14. Democracy as a Way of Life 249
James Madison: Federalist Paper #10
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty15. Through a Class Darkly 280
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto16. We Shall Overcome 293
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”
Elie Wiesel: Night17. The Psychology of Everyday Life 313
Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents18. It’s Party Time: The Ethics of Civility 328
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

III. THE PROMISES AND PERILS OF AESTHETICS, IMAGINATION, ROMANCE
19. The Morality and Immorality of Art 345
Plato: Republic
Aristotle: Politics; Poetics
Leo Tolstoy: What Is Art?20. All Stories Are True 371
Islamic Storytelling: The Arabian Nights
Ghanaian Folklore: “Why We Tell Stories About Spider”
21. How Beautiful, How Sad 385
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji22. The Uses of Idealism 405
Miguel de Cervantes: The Adventures of Don Quixote23. The Gifts of Imagination 426
William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads; The Prelude
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “A Defense of Poetry”
24. Fantasies of Seduction and the Seductions of Fantasy 446
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary25. Art for Life’s Sake 459
Théophile Gautier: Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin
Walter Pater: Conclusion to The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thomas Mann: “Death in Venice”
26. Of Love and Marriage, Passion and Aging 480
Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of the Cholera